Incident at Galley House

Incident at galley house is a deduction game where you are trying to figure out what is going on in a house where everyone was found dead.

The main mechanic of the game revolves around the prototype machine that you have set up in this house that has the ability to observe past events. The machine has several parameters you can input; time sequence, room of the house, and people. If you select the people in the correct room at the correct time, you will get to view a scene of what happened in that room during that time period. That scene will then give you information you can use to deduce another scene and so on until you piece together the big picture of what's going on throughout the house.

The story is good. It is very reminiscent of "and then there was one" by Agitha Christie. Too many spoilers in the story to say much more than that. All of the scenes are fully voice acted. The graphics serve what the game is and are not the best, but fit with what the game is trying to present. For example, the scenes are played out with "cardboard standees" in a static room where the representations of the people may move around a bit, but its not great animations and could be seen as not good graphics, but they serve the game in that having the scenes play out this way are intentionally obfuscating what your are seeing in order to make you deduce things.

One of the main highlights of the game is the deduction and logic puzzle elements. It is very cleverly put together, and feels very rewarding when you are able to figure things out. Not only are you trying to deduce who was where and when, but also why all these people have died, and their names and appearance (the characters in the game start out as numbered silhouettes). You also deduce different locations in the house and are able to add them into the machine as you play through the game, so that the deductions get more and more complicated. Mechanically, the game is pure logic and deduction.

"But Patrick, that's just a deduction game. You summed this up as 'mind blowing'. That doesn't sound very mind blowing. what gives?"

The answer to that is hard to explain without spoiling. The game immerses you into the game in such a way that I have never experienced in any other game ever. It manages to make you feel exactly what the character in the game is experiencing, and when you complete it, it feels like those mind blowing twist types of movies like "Identity" or "The Sixths sense", and it also gives you a whole new perspective on the entire game when you look back at it from the beginning in the same way that rewatching those movies does. So much so that I made my wife play it immediately after I had beaten it, and I was able to enjoy it and just as much watching her play as when I played, because I was noticing all kinds of crazy details knowing the solution.

Some of the low points are the graphics, but as previously mentioned, though the graphics aren't great, they do serve a purpose to the mechanics of the game. The game mechanics aren't super exciting; no combat, no exploration, just pure logic puzzle. There are some unrealistic and/or supernatural elements, which can be annoying sometimes in a game where you rely on reality to make deductions, but in this game it doesn't hurt the logic puzzles, nor does it make you take wild leaps in logic when solving the puzzles. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the solutions the deduction elements isn't going to be something not based in reality, even if some of the story elements are not based in reality.

It's about a 12 hour game, and easily the best deduction game I've ever played, and the only time I've ever been so awe inspired at the immersion that this game is able to achieve without you even realizing it. It doesn't fit the mold of most video games, so it's a little difficult to rate, but the experience this game provides is phenomenal.